Getting up, he picked up his jeans so he could go back to his room to shower and shave. At least she wasn’t mad at him this morning. She was sharing the blame for getting wasted.
On her side of the bed, Mia screamed and flopped back on the bed like she passed out. He was worried until he saw her hand clenching a piece of paper. With her eyes closed, she flung the paper at him and demanded, “What is this?”
Grabbing the paper out of her hand, he sat heavy on the bed. What she had handed him was a marriage certificate. For them. For Rafferty Lee Brooks and Mia Autumn Lawson.
“Your middle name is Autumn?” he asked. He had never known.
“That isnotthe important thing on that paper.”
“Well, Mrs. Brooks, this means you love me enough to spend forever with me,” he teased her, looking at the paper.
She rolled over faster than he thought possible and was on him in a heartbeat. Maybe he had gone too far. He was as shocked as she was about this.
Married?
Her nails dug eight nice trenches in his chest before he could get her flipped on her back and pinned to the bed. He brought her hands with those sharp nails above her head. Her glorious body beneath his.
“Mia, I don’t remember it anymore then you do. I was kidding.” He looked into her anger-filled hazel eyes, but they were more brown today.
“I don’t believe you,” she hissed.
“Why would I want to be married to you?” Rafferty stated, though he couldn’t really think of someone he would rather be married to.
“Thanks, Brooks. You know how to make a wife feel loved.” She mocked his earlier statement.
“If I let you go, will you not scratch me?” he asked and watched her eyes look at his chest. They flew back to his when they saw the damage she had done to him.
“I guess, unless you act like a jerk again,” Mia conceded.
Slowly, he let go of her hands and watched her closely to see if she had been lying about being nice. But she left her arms above her head until he had picked up his phone. Rolling over, he saw her pick up hers from the bed where it had landed. They both quietly scrolled through their pictures.
“Looks like you got married in the purple dress.” He showed her his phone with the photos.
“Lavender,” she corrected. “But at least it was classy. You wore jeans.”
“And a suit jacket.” He grinned at her.
“That doesn’t fit at all.” She giggled a little.
“Hey, I put forth the effort.” Shrugging, he looked through the photos painfully slow as if he was looking for something that would explain why they were getting married. There were only ten, and most were out of focus, and not one had a good reason as far as he knew.
Her eyes swept the room, and she was off the bed in an instant. He watched her pick up the dress from the middle of the floor, where it had been in a pile for who knows how long. Hurrying, she took it into the bathroom and turned on the shower, and came back out. “I hope there’s enough time to get some of the wrinkles out.”
“Are you still going to wear it to Angel’s wedding?” He sat up, not knowing how to help her with the dress.
“I have to; I don’t have another one. And there’s no time to find a new one. And I already sent her a picture of it. What am I going to tell her? That I married her brother in it already?” She looked at the license again. “Yesterday.”
“What?” he asked, grabbing it from her.
“We got married yesterday. At least it’s not the same day. God knows how it would look if two siblings got married the same day. I always thought that was creepy. Well, sort of cute, but mostly creepy.” She went into the bathroom with the dress.
“Looks like the same place, though,” he said.
She stuck her head out of the bathroom door. “Do you think they’ll remember us?”
He picked up the license again and looked at it, loving their names together on the paper. Mia Autumn Brooks, he liked it.
She came out of the bathroom empty-handed, and he put the paper on the nightstand again. “I would think there’s probably a different staff late at night than during the day.”